Re: Development process in the Ada community

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Randy Brukardt wrote:

> Well, I have a philosophical objection to the GPL (or, more accurately,
> Open Source). I believe programmers have an ethical obligation to stand
> behind their programming. There are exceptions, of course (if the


I really didn't understand what you were getting at here, till I got 
down to this next part:

> has been an important part of RR's business for years. The main problem
> (personally) is that I have a hard time delaying the support for
> unsupported customers. I've actually tried to figure out how to delay
> seeing messages on the Claw mailing list for a couple of days, simply to


Ahhhh. I think I understand. As someone who has multiple publicly 
available projects out there, I certianly know the feeling of moral 
obligation when someone asks for help with a problem in *your* code. 
With me, occasionally someone will just be so lost that it would take 
forever to help them out, and I have other commitments (a job, a house 
and yard, a wife and 2 kids) that preclude me from spending the time to 
give them the help they need. Its always painful when I have to tell 
someone I can't help them any further.


I think no matter how you go, at some point you do have to draw a line. 
ACT seems to do it by prioritzing bug fixes in favor of paying customers 
by being a bit anal about submitted bug reports being in the proper form 
from unsupported users, and by giving supported customers first dibbs on 
newly-developed code and bug fixes. It apparently works for them, but I 
have at times thought I'd have trouble being as rutheless about it as 
they seem to be. And let's not even get into the fact that asking 
customers not to redistribute the fixes you give them to non-customers 
is quite against the spirit of the GPL...

 > facilitate that. (This is the same reason I rarely buy a newspaper --
 > because I feel compelled to read it all -- a time investment I can't
 > make.)

Funny. I have that exact same problem with newspapers too. I tried 
explaining this to my father-in-law (a retired English teacher and 
regular newspaper reader) and he looked at me like I had 3 heads. :-)